I know you get this because I hear it in every conversation with every client. The second you close your laptop, something “urgent” lands in your inbox. You promised your kid you’d actually be at dinner tonight, but your brain is still triaging tomorrow’s fires. I suspect you can’t even remember the last time something felt optional instead of critical.
Harvard Business Review just put a name to this, and I love it: ambient urgency. Executive coach Karen Walker describes it as the chronic, low-grade sense that everything is urgent and nothing can wait (HBR, “3 Questions to Pressure-Test Your Priorities,” July 2026). Unlike a normal crisis, it never resolves. It’s constant noise sort of humming in the background. Permanently.
I believe Walker’s onto something even bigger than she probably realizes for parents in leadership roles, specifically. Your old prioritization tricks, using a better calendar, looking up the newest productivity hacks, hiring help, were built for temporary chaos. They assume that the urgency eventually eases. Let’s all be honest. It doesn’t. Not at work and not at home, unless you change how you’re making decisions in the first place.
So here are the three questions Walker offers to pressure-test every “urgent” decision before you touch it. I’m stealing them (with full credit) because they work as well on bedtime negotiations as they do on board meetings.
- The Replacement Test: Am I doing this because I’m the only one who can, or because I’m just the default person who always does? Be honest. Half of what’s eating your day could live on someone else’s plate.
- The Compounding Test: Will this matter next quarter, or am I just putting out today’s fire? Training your team compounds. Answering every Slack ping the second it lands does not.
- The Fear Test: Am I avoiding this decision because it’s the wrong call, or because I don’t want to deal with what happens after? Urgency makes a great disguise for avoidance.
For parents in leadership, ambient urgency doesn’t stop when you leave the office. You’re running these same tradeoffs at home, deciding in real time whether the school email, the client call, or your kiddo pulling on your sleeve is what gets your attention first. These three tests work there, too. They become a sort of life filter to view everything through.
Something many of my clients find when they go through an exercise like this is that many of these priorities aren’t yours to carry.
Your calendar isn’t what’s broken. Your filter though, may need to be revisited.